Attendance is considered one of the most important elements in planning and assessing the viability or success of various types of businesses. In fact, academia and private industry have long experimented with attendance forecasting models, for example, in an attempt to better predict inventories, sales, and to manage operating expenses.
The inventor hereof has recognized, however, that conventional attendance forecasting models have relied on limited types of input data, and have not been scaled across different industries. These models are also not configured to integrate data in real-time to facilitate dynamic evaluations. Moreover, conventional models are not amenable to being exposed such that the public at large—i.e., other than the model's designer (typically the business owner)—may take advantage of attendance forecast information, for instance, to make real-time consumer decisions. In light of these and other concerns, the inventor hereof has developed the various systems and methods of crowd prediction and attendance forecasting described below.